The Confession Page 33

  Gyula kept looking back over his shoulder. I thought that he was trying to catch my eye. But he was looking farther back, to where the dead man lay.

  We reached the barbed wire and waited while the guards conferred by the front gate with Gogu. He looked healthier now that he was in business again. They handed him a file full of papers, and he spoke to his men, his flushed bald head bobbing as he joked. Then the guards ran about, shouting, rounding us up into lines like soldiers on display. Gogu put his hands behind his back and waited until we were ready.

  “Welcome,” he shouted, his dirty voice on the edge of breaking, “to Work Camp Number Four-Eighty! I am Captain Gregor Kaganovich and you are my pets! I reward and I punish—I am your last recourse before your god!” He raised his thumb. “Only one rule here—this is simple, now—work! If you want to eat, you work! If you want to sleep, you work! If you ever want to leave here alive, what must you do?”

  A couple prisoners in the front answered him, and two guards came over and slapped their faces.

  “Work,” said Gogu. “Not talk.”

  The blows began. Each guard had a truncheon that he used with fervor, beating us in the general direction of the gate. I caught sight of Filip, the excess skin collecting on the back of his neck, his scarred face twisted into screams as he swung. They beat us into five groups in front of the five buildings. My back and arms stung, and my ear was bleeding. The guard who struck me on the ear shouted, “It’s the big ones that go first, bastard! It’s the big ones we liquidate!”

  He was the one who ordered us to strip completely, except for our shoes, and throw our clothes into a pile. We were marched around the side of the buildings, where four guards stood with razors to shave our heads. We froze in that line, waiting for the guards to dump water on our heads and then chip at our scalps. The barber took my hand. “What are these?” He tugged a ring—Hans Lieblich—off my left pinkie. “Hey, Filip!”

  Filip came over and called me a bourgeois pansy, then the two of them worked each ring off. Not once did Filip recognize me, and I never saw my German soldiers, nor my wedding band, again.

  We waited, arms around ourselves, shivering. Beside the barbed wire were two full burlap sacks. The guard shouted for our attention and walked over to one. He opened it so we could clearly see the dead man inside, his battered face lumpy and purple.

  “This!” the guard shouted. “This is the only way out of here!”

  Under a rain of more truncheon blows we ran inside the barracks. On the rotting hay was a pile of soiled, striped prison clothes. The guard screamed at us to dress.

  It’s hard to say what I was feeling at that point. A certain terror, yes, but a part of me was sure I would make it out alive. The extremity of my surroundings was almost too deadly to comprehend, so I held on to the only thing I could understand: Gogu’s one rule: work. I was still a strong man, and could at least keep up with that. And this was my mistake: I still thought that rules had a power of their own. I thought that camp rules would ensure a path of safety.

  5

  That night the weary veterans, who had been out at Work Site Number Two all day, returned to the barracks. Some became angry when they found their bunks occupied by newcomers, while others, too weary to shout, simply dropped into a free shelf. Some questions were answered. We would know when to do what by a bugle call. When to wake, eat, and work. The work at Site Two—the new project Gogu had mentioned a long time ago—was digging: They were building a canal to the Tisa, about five and a half miles away.

  The bugle sounded early, and I woke to the cold and a sweet, sickening smell. As I climbed down from the bunk, I asked a veteran who slept below me. He was an old man with a permanent look of worry on his face. “The pus,” he said. “You’ll smell like that once you’ve been hit enough. You’ll get worms, too, but don’t worry, they’ll clean those out in the infirmary.”

  There were more truncheon blows when we gathered for the morning roll call behind the barracks. The sun had not yet risen, and in the darkness a guard with a wavering, young voice called the names and we each yelled “Here here!” as loudly as we could. Gogu looked on from the door of his office. Halfway through the names a heavy, bearded guard reached forward and pulled one of the new prisoners—a student—out of our ranks and dragged him to an electrical pole. As the names continued, he shouted at the student to hold on to the pole, and as he did so, began beating the student’s back. Whenever the student screamed, he delivered a blow to his head. This went on until the student passed out. Roll call was over.

  We had the same kind of soup and bread I’d had in Yalta 36, sitting outside in the cold, and were then marched through the predawn night out of the camp and farther east. I was hit a couple times by the barracks guard, and the old, worried man was hit three times. It impressed me that, despite the blackening welt that showed when his shirt rose from his hip, he could keep moving. There were about three hundred of us in all, being beaten across the wheatfields, two miles to Work Site Number Two.

  The work on the canal had not been going on long. A crevice about fifty yards wide and a quarter of a mile long had been dug, and we were told that our daily quota was ten cubic yards. If we did not reach that quota, we would be punished. Each of us was given a shovel and a wheelbarrow and sent into the hole. They had picked a sandy area, and as we hefted the heavy wheelbarrows sand spilled out. The guard standing by the truck where we dumped it looked at each load critically, asked our name, and marked down an estimate. This went on.

  The first day was the hardest. It was unbelievable how heavy those wheelbarrows were, and how undependable the sandy wall of the canal could get. Often I would make it halfway up, only to slide and see my entire load turn over. A guard would scream at me from above, accusing me of sabotage, while I tried to focus and fill it up again. I didn’t make the quota at all the first week, and each night, after a dinner of more soup, I cut wood outside, under the glare of the camp searchlights.

  Although they sometimes made excuses, it became evident that the killings had no logic other than the logic of terror. Those who did not collapse on their own could at any moment be pulled out of roll calls, out of our dinner huddle, out of work details or bed. Sometimes a guard approached a prisoner in the morning and held a small mirror in front of his face. “Take a good look—this is the last time you’ll see yourself alive!” Then he handed the prisoner a burlap bag to carry to the work site, and that night the bag carried him back.

  By the second week I was terrorized into submission.

  I talked with the other prisoners during the rare instances when exhaustion did not make me mute. There were all kinds: students, Gypsies, factory workers, and even some who had been in the Party—the old worried man had been the head of his metalworking collective until he was turned in. “I know who it was, though,” he whispered to me one night, the worry suddenly fleeing his face. “Wlodja Stanislavsky. He’s one of the machinists, and for the last five years he’s been in love with my wife. But she would never touch that dirty Pole. So he decided to get rid of me.” He shook his head. “That bastard will only have her if he rapes her.”

  His name was Tibor Petrescu. He had been in the camp for a month when I arrived, and each Sunday when we were allowed to rest he wrote his wife long, convoluted letters. At first I wrote letters, too. I wrote to Emil, asking him to find a way to get me out, and I wrote to Magda, in order to reassure her of my health and love. I had been a fool to let her and Ágnes go—given the chance again, I would have sent Leonek to The Crocodile that night. How could I have hesitated when she asked to be taken back? In the camp I found the limits of my maturity. But after a while, I stopped writing altogether. I had asked Tibor if he ever received answers from his wife, and his no reminded me that mail did not leave this camp. Everything remained stacked in that steel cabinet in the commander’s office to be read over brandies and cigarettes, for a laugh.

  I gave up, and gave in to the regime of work. I watched the other prisoners fa
ll, and once brought back a burlap sack filled with Gyula, the student, thinking only that his fear had reached its end.

  Despite all the sand we dug, the canal seemed to make no progress. Gogu arrived with a uniformed officer, shouting at us from above, and the next day the quota was raised to twelve cubic yards. I was just able to keep up, but Tibor fell short often, and at night I’d hear him grunting in the yard as I tried to sleep, then the thud as his ax hit wood.

  6

  Two and a half months into my stay, I was at the work site, collapsing beneath the weight of a wheelbarrow filled with snow-damp sand, when the mustached barracks guard—the Cosmin I’d heard of in another life—appeared at the edge of the canal. He put his hands on his hips. That morning he had pulled a boy from the roll call, ordered him to strip naked, then made him sit in the snow and cover himself with it, like a blanket. When we marched off to work, the boy was still there, rasping through congested pipes, turning blue. “Kolyeszar!” I looked up, my empty stomach tightening. “Get up here, Kolyeszar!”

  I left the wheelbarrow and climbed up the embankment. Cosmin grabbed my ear and started walking forward—I had to bend so it wouldn’t tear off. He walked me to another guard, who kept his machine gun pointed at me.

  “Take care of him,” said Cosmin.

  I could hardly walk back across the wheatfields. I didn’t know why they hadn’t killed me there, in front of the others. Shooting me in secret just didn’t make sense—it was the one thing I felt must make sense—and only when we were in sight of the camp did I begin to suspect that I wasn’t going to die.

  We went in through the back gate and stopped at the commander’s shack. The guard knocked and waited. By the fence was a burlap sack. I knew, by glancing over to the empty yard, that the frozen boy was in it. “Enter.” The guard opened the door and pushed me inside before closing it again. The warmth enveloped me as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. Gogu sat at his desk, fanning himself with a file, while beside him, impassive, stood Brano Sev.

  He said, “Hello, Ferenc.”

  “Hello.”

  “Can you excuse us, Comrade Commander?”

  Gogu stopped fanning himself and looked at Sev. He seemed about to protest, but then lumbered out, muttering to himself. Sev took the commander’s seat and motioned to a chair. I collapsed into it.

  “You don’t look good, Ferenc. Camp life doesn’t suit you.”

  “You’re right.”

  “And that smell.”

  “It’s the pus.”

  “Well, let’s see if we can get you out.”

  I didn’t answer, afraid that anything I said might ruin this one tenuous possibility.

  “I should tell you,” he said after a moment. “You should know that I never knew about this. About Kaminski. He was sent to help me with my work, and for a while he did just that. I was grateful for his help. But when he started showing interest in Nestor Velcea I became suspicious.”

  He paused, so I ventured an observation: “But it was you looking at his file.”

  “Yes,” he said. “After Kaminski had already been through it. I wanted to know why he was so interested in an ex–camp prisoner, and so interested in your case. The only connection seemed to be that he was running the Office of Internal Corrections at the same time Nestor was put away. But I didn’t know enough to understand everything. Maybe if you had been more honest with me in the first place, I could have helped.”

  I looked at my blackened fingernails. “But you did know about Sergei.”

  “Of course,” he said without inflection. “I knew about the execution in ’forty-six. You have to understand: Back then we were still fighting a war. It wasn’t as relaxed as it is now.”

  “Relaxed?”

  As he talked, he arranged his hands on the desk, as if plotting out moves. “People forget. I learned of Sergei’s execution just after Kaminski performed it. It was a necessary thing. Sergei’s investigation threatened to undermine the entire Soviet presence in the country. We still had Fascists in the hills, and foreign instigators were spread throughout the city. They could have used the investigation to devastating effect.”

  I didn’t want to argue. “What about Nestor?”

  “That was what I didn’t know. I didn’t know there had been a witness to the synagogue murders—no record was kept of it in our files. And I certainly didn’t know how Kaminski was connected to those girls. One expects more of state security.” He shook his head. “But Kaminski finally admitted it all. In the interview room.”

  “Oh.”

  “I might have turned a blind eye to some of this, but I could not allow that Kaminski had killed Stefan. That was entirely beyond imagining.”

  “Where is he now?”

  Sev looked at his own fingernails, which were very clean. “He’s dead, Ferenc. His body was found in the Tisa. He’d been shot in the back of the head.”

  I leaned forward, not quite understanding. “He—”

  “Don’t ask, Ferenc.”

  I took a deep, wavering breath as I leaned back again.

  “Nestor Velcea is in a work camp in the east. He’s a miner. And now to you.” He straightened in his chair. “I’ve spent the last months arranging an amnesty. It was not easy. I couldn’t defend your actions on November the sixth, but I did talk with them in more depth about the situation with the Woznica woman. Emil was useful in this, as he knew the whole story. I was hoping that Malik Woznica himself could verify some facts, but he has not yet been found.”

  I noticed my cold hands were beginning to shake.

  “The best I could arrange was internal exile. You won’t be allowed in the Capital again, not without proper authorization.”

  I remembered to say, “Thank you.”

  “One condition.”

  “What?”

  “A confession. It’s bureaucratic, a simple thing. But they want an in-depth confession of your crime, as well as a full report on the case. You will deliver this to me.”

  “And what will you do with it?”

  “I’ll put it in your file. Type it up in the proper format, numbered, and wire me when you’re finished. That’s all they want.”

  Later, I would think about how he used the word “they” instead of the more appropriate “we,” but at the time I just looked at my hands, at the red and black sores that covered them.

  He said he would be back in a week with the release papers, and that in the meantime I should stay alive. I asked him how I should go about doing that. He shrugged. “Work hard.”

  7

  Over the next week I saw two more inmates shot, one of them Tibor Petrescu. He was killed in the wheatfields at twilight, on our way back to the camp. That day Tibor’s wheelbarrow had slid back on top of him, crushing his leg, and he spent the rest of the day up by the truck, helping collect sand that spilled out. In the fields he fell three times, and Cosmin, without hesitation, walked over and put a bullet in his head. He knew that Tibor and I had been friends, so he tossed me the burlap sack, and said, “He’s all yours, Kolyeszar.”

  I collected Tibor as well as I could, at first trying not to look at the hole in his forehead. But then, as I folded his legs to make him fit into the bag, I paused to look directly into his face. He’d made it through a lot, but in the end a wheelbarrow signified his death. I hadn’t told him or anyone else about my impending release, because I didn’t want to face their agonizing, jealous stares, but I wished I had told him.

  The next morning, which I later learned was the twentieth of February 1957, Cosmin came into the barracks before wake-up and called my name. Everyone moaned, half-awake, and I climbed down. “Now!” Cosmin shouted, and I hurried over to him. He quickly swung his truncheon against my arm, sending a bright, wakening pain through me. “Let’s get going.”

  I followed him to the front gates, where a guard handed me a clipboard with a form on it. I couldn’t read it in the darkness, but signed where he pointed a finger. He lifted the sheet and had me sign anot
her. Then a third. Cosmin grabbed my shoulder and pushed me forward as the guard opened the gate. “I better not see you again,” he whispered in my ear.

  The gate closed behind me.

  What I hadn’t seen in the darkness was a white Mercedes moving slowly up the long dirt path from the main road. Its lights leapt as it bumped along. Then it stopped about ten yards from me, and the driver’s door opened. A figure stood up and waved.

  My legs no longer supported me. It was Emil.

  8

  “Jesus, Ferenc. What did they do to you?”

  I didn’t answer. I couldn’t even smile. Because I knew this must all be a dream. And I would wake soon to the bugle call and rotting mattresses and truncheons.

  The female desk clerk at the Hotel Elegant—not Tania—was reluctant to give us a room when she saw me, and Emil had to use his Militia certificate to persuade her. “Don’t destroy the place,” she said as she handed over the key.

  I took a long bath. Emil had been speaking ever since he picked me up, pausing only to puzzle over my silence and try to think of something else to say, but I hadn’t heard a word. The water blackened very quickly, so I emptied and refilled the tub. My sores hurt when I squeezed them dry, then scoured them. My hair had been shaved again the previous week, but the lice had returned to infest the little hair that had grown, so I used a razor to shave it off again. As I dried I caught myself in the mirror and understood Emil’s horror.